Disney Gets Rid of its Imagineering R&D Group! From Animated Movies-'Kurt' writes the following, in response to the Marty Sklar article (ABOVE): "Check the timing! Yesterday Eisner closed the R&D section of
imagineering and fired hundreds of people in
imagineering leaving only a skeleton crew left. Eisner has violated almost every one of Marty and Walt's ten rules. The pink slips and the fluff article no matter how well deserved indicates to me that Marty is on his way out and
Imagineering is a thing of the past." And indeed, Mouse Planet reports that "a few months ago, the head of R&D, Eric Haseltine, left Disney to join the National Security Agency. He gave everyone a pep talk about how Disney still values R&D, etc, but the writing on the wall [was that] Disney wanted to get rid of its R&D group. Last week, they announced the plan to merge
Imagineering R&D into the regular
Imagineering team, and on Wednesday, a large percentage of R&D was notified that they were fired. Eisner has to cut hundreds of millions of dollars to satisfy the investors, [so] people with 15+ years with Disney, and many successful products and patents behind them, were shown the door."